Dan Doctoroff, Bloomberg's all-powerful development czar, very rarely has his ass kicked in public. But at a Harlem symposium on Robert Moses's legacy last night, Majora Carter, who runs the environmental advocacy group Sustainable South Bronx, did just that. As various bigshots praised the vital role of public input in today's successful megaprojects — Atlantic Yards was never mentioned — Doctoroff contended that Team Bloomberg had buried Moses's high-handed legacy. Carter, whose group has proposed a recycling facility where the city wants to build a 2,000-bed jail, begged to differ.
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The Spitzer administration seems poised to undo a former public official's legacy in the South Bronx — and this time we mean Robert Moses, not George Pataki. Community groups in the neighborhood have been trying since 1999 to raze Moses's 1.25-mile, never-completed Sheridan Expressway and build a 28-acre greenway underneath. The state Department of Transportation committed a decade ago to overhauling parts of the Sheridan, but bureaucrats had dawdled while seeking easy plans for big contractors (and, as goes without saying, ignoring locals' thirst for parkland). Now, says Sustainable South Bronx director Majora Carter, two of the four scenarios the state will consider this year include the local bikeway plan. That would replace the Tyrolean folly in the top picture with the boulevard in the lower shot. The community-proposed path would end at a park on a former cement plant usable for kayak launches. And it would mesh with Mayor Mike's notion of making the mainland borough a middle-class beachhead. Imagine: You might pedal to Hunts Point's wholesalers with your grocery basket and shopping list. What would Moses think? —Alec AppelbaumREAD MORE »PREV1NEXT